Artist Statement : NANA & FELIX

Artist Statement

Nana (Hwanhee Kim, 1980, South Korea) & Felix (Felix Nybergh, 1985, Finland) are an artist duo working together since 2012. Originally trained as a painter and a photographer respectively, we carry out projects in a wide range of different media, often in series, such as drawings, photographs, texts, video, three dimensional works, sound installation, etc.

Our work always stems from personal experiences and the need to contextualise them within the larger political and social reality we live in. The connecting thread within our admittedly eclectic projects is a yearning to understand our own place within an perpetually redeveloping, industrialised, man-built world. We often employ a photographical language, in a straightforward documentational manner, mixed with a touch of irony.

In our first two projects "SoMe" and "The Zone System" we explore how photographs are deployed in order to manipulate the public. Both projects focus on authoritative images, such as those used by law enforcement and the advertisement industry. By mimicking, recreating and repositioning, the projects expose the absurd nature of the image. Our recent projects "Let There be Motorways" and "WEAST" have been carried out between the years 2015 and 2018, when we lived in South Korea. Conditioned by the peculiar history of this country both projects deal with a bizarre version of cultural appropriation. We have examined how a national project has been developed based on a foreign, misinterpreted and misunderstood imagery. Our response to such imagery resulted in producing a series of works disguised as a traditional art.

As visual artists, we aspire to expand our understanding of the ways our lives as both artists and citizens unfold within the society we live in. All of our projects, both past and future, always try to challenge our own prejudices, processing them with honesty, irony and humility.